


Man Is the Warmest Place to Hide

by FourthAxis



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Dark Romance, Dead People, Disturbing Themes, Horror, Lovecraftian, M/M, Monsters, Old Gods, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Season 3 Horror AU, eldritch horror, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love an Old God
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-16 13:16:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8103883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FourthAxis/pseuds/FourthAxis
Summary: After the incident in Hannibal's kitchen that left Will clinging to life by a thread, nothing feels quite right with the world. It seems as though he has woken in a different place filled with different rules, where reality decided to peel itself back and reveal the madness beneath. Time is meaningless, distances arbitrary, and all around them walk strange things that never fully resemble people. Only Will can see these changes, and only Will can see the dead girl that now guides his steps. And only Will can hear the whispers coming from across the ocean that sound so much like the man that left him so irreversibly aware. He wonders why, and goes looking for answers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is the tagline of one of my favourite horror films, The Thing. This fic, though, has little to do with The Thing other than some homages sprinkled here and there. I tried, I really did, but it wasn’t happening, not this time at least. So instead what I have for you is some classic Lovecraftian mindfuckery where fun is made of common Hannibal tropes but not in a funny way.   
> Chapter 1 of 4. The rest will come out throughout the BigBang week with one or two days between them.
> 
> The highest of fives goes out to my Big Bang partner [Hanni Bunny Lecter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/carrionofmywaywardson/pseuds/Hanni%20Bunny%20Lecter) ([tumblr](http://hanni-bunny-lecter.tumblr.com/)), the mastermind behind all the glorious art accompanying the fic <3!  
> See her [AO3 entry](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8097181) or [tumblr post](http://hanni-bunny-lecter.tumblr.com/post/150732688825/after-the-incident-in-hannibals-kitchen-that-left) for the images in their full size glory.

 

He watched himself from afar and wondered how he’d never noticed before.

Firelight washed the room in a dim but golden glow, and even as shadows danced on their faces, soft smiles were exchanged and telling of their shared little secrets and intimate moments hidden behind closed doors. In a way, that’s all that Hannibal and he had, though the closed doors never belonged to a bedroom. Will was shocked at the discovery on his face once, and would be again had this not been the nth iteration of the same dream. He could say the exact number, were he awake, but numbers never made any sense in dreams and the fingers on his hands remained uncountable.

But that’s not how he knew he was dreaming. Honestly, Will couldn’t say how he knew. Perhaps the repetitions had engraved themselves in his head, or perhaps lucid dreaming had become a new unwanted talent. And perhaps it didn’t matter because all his awareness could never change the course of the dream.

Right on cue a cold chill crept up his spine with the smell of rain and blood, and Will knew when he’d turn the room would bleed in a blur of motion from Hannibal’s office to Hannibal’s kitchen, and his clothes would be wet, and his limbs cold and petrified to his sides as he’d meet Hannibal’s sad, disappointed gaze.

Sometimes, but not always, Will would say, “I told you to leave.”

And sometimes, but not always, Hannibal would answer, “We couldn’t leave without you.”

Sometimes they’d speak words to each other they’d already said once, in different moments and circumstances, and Will expected as much when he felt his mouth open.

“I’ll be released from the hospital soon.”

That was odd and new and off the script, and so was Hannibal’s smile, the kind he’d never wear in that moment, equal parts ominous and serene. He made the tell-tale move towards Will and if the dream could finally veer off into a strange new direction, then so might Will and so might he finally catch a glimpse of what was in Hannibal’s hands.

 _Gutted with surgical precision_ , the doctors told him when he woke from the original nightmare, but Will knew what he felt and he had the cruel pleasure of reliving it every night since. That was no knife piercing him, but the dream wouldn’t let him find out what it was either. His eyes follow the line of Hannibal’s blood soaked sleeve and they followed and they followed and they followed until they ached with exertion and Will has to close them for fear his sight might leave him altogether, his eyes rolling in on themselves.

One arm took him in a gentle embrace while the other plunged into his abdomen and Will was so used to the intrusion he barely even yelped at the slithering touch squirming inside and making a mangled nest out of his insides. And just when he was about to call this dream a one-off glitch in a perfect loop of predictable torment, he heard the whisper of Hannibal’s voice clear in his ear. Not silence, or static, or that guttural low sound he used to hear that was impossible for a human to make. No, this time, as Hannibal pushed his lips to the shell of his ear, this time he heard the words and understood them, and it shocked him so much he forgot the torrents of blood pouring between them.

“Find me.” English, understandable, human words. _Find me._

And then Will woke at precisely 3:00 AM, as he had every night so far. Except this time someone was waiting at the foot of his bead, someone whose name was quietly omitted in his presence, who Will didn’t need to ask about because when he woke the first time he felt an acute sense of loss that could only mean one thing.

Rays of moonlight shone past thin curtains as they had, inexplicably, every night. But now they spilled across the image of a girl suspended in the moment of carnage that took her life. Her clothes were soaked with her dried blood, rivulets of blue veins visible on her ghostly pale skin, her lips dry, chapped, colourless, and a gash from ear to ear, like a second smile gaping wide and bloody around her neck.

Will felt his eyes sting as he said her name. “Abigail.”

She reached up and pushed fingers into the cut that took her life, probing and adjusting until the noise in her mouth was less a gurgle or a grown, more something akin to words. The sounds were harsh and unusual, nothing like the sweet girlish voice Will remembered. Little about her was.

Her words came out difficult and broken, but they came. “He left something in me, too,” and her glassy dead eyes travelled down Will’s frame and settled on his abdomen.

A hand was resting there because in this liminal space between dreams and reality, Will could always feel something stir beneath the skin. Even now when he was more awake than usual, talking to a dead girl he used to know.

“But he took it out,” she added.

“I’m sorry,” Will whispered.

There was something akin to mirth in her thousand-yard glare and atrophy-laden muscles pulled a smile on her lips as best they could. “You didn’t kill me. But you can help me rest.”

Will closed his eyes for just one moment, a single shuddering breath and a thousand questions lay in front of him, but as he opened them again—

She was gone. It was daylight. The doctor was coming in with the good news. The gash across his stomach that had him bedbound and immovable was now a slight silvery line.

*

Will could only describe his hospital experience as utterly strange, but that could not compare to what was waiting for him outside.

The very first time he truly realised something was wrong was when he drove home.

An hour and a half drive from Baltimore to Wolf Trap on a good day, and that happened to be a good day, an awfully good day to catch barely a soul on the I-95. Maybe it was the weather, all misty and drab and sunless, but that couldn’t explain an empty highway on a Tuesday afternoon.

Will didn’t think much of it at first, too preoccupied with normal worries like the state of his house and dogs, an empty fridge, dealing with reporters that surely caught wind of his leave. The newspaper he bought had a giant red headline with Hannibal on it, fresh-faced and smiling. _The monster lurking beneath_ , it said, but the glances Will kept sneaking at it had little to do with its speculative content.

And then Will’s eyes caught something strange in the fog. Not another car, no, there were no cars around, but what he saw battling through the thick grey mist was a sign and a turn that, under normal circumstances, would take him on a side road and towards his house. But these were no normal circumstances. The analogue watch in his car told him barely ten minutes passed since he entered the highway.

 _Impossible_ , he thought, but as he drove Will realised he was almost home just as he took the turn towards his little white house.

He killed the engine upon reaching the driveway and sat there, hands still on his wheel in quiet bafflement. Will drove his car for barely ten minutes, that much he was crisply aware of, and the roads seemed to have unnoticeably warped and defied physics itself as if to tell him otherwise. He thought back to the many drives he had back and forth, to the plane rides and cab rides and boating expeditions of his youth, and found himself remembering anew just how impossibly short they all were. Why had he never notice before? Why was this casual breaking of reality’s rules not sending him in a maddened frenzy?

 _He left something in me,_ Abigail had told him. _He left something in me, too_ , were here full words, and Will’s hand rubbed at his stomach, at the silvery scar that signified a healing unnaturally quick.

Alana was waiting on the porch of his house, leaning on a cane to keep her steady, and there it was, another person in this world that healed too quick for the damage she sustained. But Will knew better than to ask her anything, because he was certain she did not notice.

Where his certainty came from, he could not tell.

She told him the feds and the Interpol and everyone under the sun was looking for Hannibal. She told him the news were full of scandals and lies, and not to pay attention to them. She told him of Jack’s suspension and his wife’s death. She told him his dogs were inside, and then she left.

But his dogs were not inside. The house was empty, their toys and beds untouched, and Will sadly wondered if they were ever even real.

He sat on his bed, feeling a terrible loneliness, something his dogs could help him with, but they weren’t there and Will’s thoughts ran right into Hannibal’s arms. An old memory of a dinner shared in candle light, willingly devour flesh for the sake of his guise… and for the want of his soul. He enjoyed it too much to call it a game, and he thrilled in the way Hannibal looked at him, like the man had found something beautiful he never knew was missing in his life.

_Find me._

A foul stench dragged Will out of his warm memories. Abigail’s slowly bloating corpse sat next to him, her skin taking on a sickly yellow tone. “You should find a boat,” she rasped.

He should find a boat.

In that moment, after a long day of the world slowly peeling off its false face and revealing the madness beneath, Will had never felt more sane in his life.

*

He dreamt of Hannibal again in a room of old gold and forgotten history. People danced all around them in perfect unity, and so did they.

“I don’t know how to dance,” Will confessed, feeling a little too warm in the sleek new wools of his tailored suit. Or perhaps it was the lack of distance between them, Hannibal’s hands on his body, his own on Hannibal’s.

The other smiled and his eyes seemed so warm in that moment, so human. “I think you do,” he said and both their eyes looked to their feet that moved in perfect unison.

Explaining it in a dream was simple, a dream Will was aware of, but were he to wake up and stand from his bed, Will found a strange conviction that the moves from his dream would have followed him into reality. A knowledge he did not possess suddenly engraved in his bones.

“What is happening,” Will looked to Hannibal with a pleading voice. The hand on his shoulder squeezed and felt solid muscle and bone beneath layers of rich fabric. Even for a dream that felt too real. “What did you do to me?”

“Opened your eyes,” Hannibal said with his typical nonchalance.

Will squeezed his eyes shut and they stung with unshed tears of grief and confusion. Why him? What had he done to deserve this? What old god thought this gift of sigh a blessing?

He opened his eyes and looked upon Hannibal and knew at least one of those answers.

“Be careful out there,” his partner’s face took a grave shade, his voice low. “You are weak yet and your presence won’t be appreciated.”

Will’s eyes darted around the crowd dancing about them, and in a sea of faces he caught sights of something wrong, sharp, and dangerous looking at him.

“Who are you,” Will asked and for his effort he got spun so hard it made him dizzy, his balance lost.

When he got up from the floor, the ball room was empty and dark, its previously lustrous interior a decrepit wreck, the air musty with stale wood and a hundred years old dust. He whispered Hannibal’s name and the soft echo carried around rooms and hallways deep within.

Will was afraid to move, afraid of making another sound, until he heard it resonating through the… the…

The castle. It was a castle. Old thing, ancient, rebuilt so many times through the ages on so many different places. And through its hallways rang a low rumbling noise, a beast’s murmur. Will followed it through mazes of archways and rooms, careful in his step not to disturb any of the wreckage, or trip on it. At some point he forgot he was dreaming and started doubting it all together, so he took off his watch as he approached the source of the noise and left it on a dusty old commode standing defiantly by the door behind which the noise was loudest.

Will’s hands were gentle as they rested against the arched double doors, as if touching an old living thing. They creaked softly as they opened and Will was greeted with a moonlit outline of something horrible resting across the wide expanse of the floor.

 

_In his house, Hannibal waits dreaming._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just gonna keep posting this cover art over and over. It's so good.  
> Obligatory The Thing homage in this chapter + shit officially gets super weird. Really super weird.

Will fiddled with his glasses as he sat on a bench in the local dog park. He didn’t need them anymore, not for driving or reading; another in the line of inexplicable healings. But he still kept them around, enjoyed the feel of them in his breast pocket, something old and familiar to ground him. And he needed some grounding with what he now saw.

Will missed his dogs fiercely, but instead of seeing something akin them scurrying around the park, he only saw people walk with empty leashes tied around their hands. And dogs weren’t the only animals missing. As he shopped for supplies, Will noticed a distinct lack of street cats and a total absence of birds. Not a distant chirp could be heard, not a meow or a bark. Nothing. Streets as empty of sound as they were of people. Maybe it was the weather, still murky and grey and thick with fog. Maybe it was that particular neighbourhood. And maybe they too were never real either.

Dwelling on the absence of what used to be his friends could take up all his thoughts, but Will’s focus was elsewhere, stolen by the people walking around the park. Or, more precisely, stolen by things that walked around the people.

More details only he could see, but for every few men and women he could recognize as genuine, there were strange imitations walking by them, with them, and past them. Some looked normal enough with a few misshaped limbs and an odd curve to their step. Others looked like someone decided to shape a man without truly know what a man looked like, their faces uncanny and wildly repulsive, assembled with all the right pieces but no knowledge where to put properly them. Eyes too big or too wide apart, mouth slacking and jaw skewed, an arm too long, a leg bent the wrong way, skin pulled on like an ill-fitting rubber suit.

 _Evil minds_ , Will thought. The monsters he specialized in, the kind he caught, the serial killers and the murderers hiding in plain sight and there were so many of them. One for each day of the week.

Some looked at him oddly with their misshapen eyes, like they knew he knew, and Will was quick to leave with a strange sense of threat twisting in his gut. But he did not go home. He wanted to see what they looked like with the skins pulled off and he knew exactly where to get his answers.

Chilton was oddly agreeably, though narrow-eyed and questioning, but his easy compliance was the least of the world’s strange turns. Will asked to see Eldon Stammets, one of the first he’d caught under Hannibal Lecter’s tender care.

His cell was in the basement levels, among the same grimy walls Will once was held in, long ago, so long it almost felt like another lifetime and a different person.

“Third on the left,” Chilton said and waited by the stairs where the guards of the block also stood.

Viscous drippings covered the inner walls of the unclean cells, but only one on his way was occupied, the third on the left. The cage was dark as Will approached it, a blackness unimaginable swallowing what little light the fluorescent lamps were giving. Will came inches away from the bars to try and peer through the darkness, and as his eyes slowly adjusted he heard a slippery wet sound that he could only describe as meat hitting against cement. The outline of Mr. Stammets became visible in the darkness as he heard another slithering noise followed by a low gurgling sound that could not possibly come from a man’s throat.

Will snapped his head away and stepped back, eyes closed. The bare glimpse was enough and too much all at once, and his eyes stung for it, his nose burning with an alien stench. He left with incredible haste as his heart thrummed wildly and a thousand questions formed on his mind. What was that thing? How did it come to be? Did someone leave something in Eldon Stammets too? Did Will catch a glimpse of his own fate?

He stood on his porch, hands gripping the railing, and for the first time since madness became clarity did Will feel a striking terror wrap around him like an old itchy cloak. His eyes watched the woods that surrounded his house, their scaly black bark and sinewy shape that that reached up, up, up like vines and in a manner no tree ever should. No canopy on top, just sharp jagged points, and yet the forest of these would be trees swallowed up all the light like it was nothing, and more thin sinewy things moved in its shadows.

Will did not feel safe and Abigail was there behind him with a sudden putrid waft to confirm his suspicions with a failing voice. “Don’t go near them. Don’t go near water either.”

He looked back at her and was amazed how much comfort a dead thing could bring him. But it wasn’t enough, and he missed his dogs, and he missed the safety of them too. Abigail seemed to know what he was thinking before he even said a thing, and she smiled as best she could with maggots dripping from the corners of her lips and said, “Miss them harder.”

What followed was hard to describe, but he did just that, and it made his gut ache something wicked. Will heaved and felt like retching, like something was rising on a tide deep inside him and clawing its way out. It lodged in his throat and he couldn’t breathe, black spots filling out his vision. He tried to get inside his safe haven, away from the trees and what moved between them, but he never made it to the door.

Time as a concept was a fake and frivolous thing in this world, and Will didn’t care much for it anymore. So when he woke on his porch, he did not bother with question of how long, just that he was and that something was licking at his face.

Will swallowed down the remnants of a bitter taste in his mouth. “Buster,” he croaked upon seeing the dog, touched him and felt his fur, and the dog barked in clear recognition of his name. Their joy was immense.

With senses regained and a stable footing, Will glanced at the black woods and noticed that in the time he was out, they seemed to have moved closer to his house. Buster growled, but Will was quick to pick him up and carry him inside the house where he pulled all the curtain and closed all the blinds.

He sat on his bed and watched the dog wag its tail. One down, six more to go.

Will did not remember blinking. He did not remember thinking anything, feeling anything, moving or speaking until it was over, yet he felt undeniably tied to the situation like a pivotal ingredient.

Buster rolled on his back and he looked like he wanted to be pet, but that wasn’t what was happening. The flesh beneath expanded beyond the constrains of the dog’s fur, a growing globulous mound, and the appendages too grew in size and amount. A slick sheen covered the wriggling shape, something viscous or bloody, or both. Pieces started rolling off, chunks of flesh unsticking from its origin as the head that once belonged to a dog wailed and shrieked. Seven individual pieces of tumorous meat grew and expanded from the mass, some growing teeth and claws and they all shrieked in unison. The fleshy masses bulged and pulsed, grew and stretched and slowly died until what was in them chewed its way out and ate their own placentas.

Seven happy tail wagging dogs covered in a clear slimy residue were what remained, the ruined carpet and their filth the only reminders of the horrors that birthed them. Each on responded to the sound of their own name and Will’s smiled and his heart leapt.

“You guys need a wash,” he said and stood up, stepping over the placental remains as he made his way to the bathroom, and the dogs followed.

*

Will never left his house anymore without a dog or two. The odd human imitations walking around seemed to be wary of them. The woods, though, they never approached, or any body of water, but at least the forest’s borders didn’t move closer to his house.

One morning he felt a chill in the air and Will knew it would snow soon. It always snowed. People spoke of summer, of vacation time, of sandy beaches and sandals and short sleeves. Will even remembered himself in countless situations that fit those descriptions of summer. And of course he did! He was from the south and south was warm and humid and—

and—

There was an odd air of falseness and forgery living in those memories, and Will couldn’t shake the feeling that he had never felt summer. Never seen the sun. Never been warm. An existential dread kept creeping into his mind and he could no longer work on the boat engine with steady hands. He should have finished it sooner, all things considered, but a trepidation of what was to come held him back so he wasted time reading the news and driving around cities ten unreasonable minutes away.

Sometimes he’d visit Jack or Alana and observe with a disturbed fascination as the memory of Hannibal Lecter slipped slowly from their minds, and the minds of all men around. What was once a vehement drive for justice and vengeance, now died with each passing day a little more. The news talked less about him, the people talked less about him, even his victims, until a day came when the sound of his name brought forth no reaction at all.

“Do you remember Hannibal,” Will had asked Jack recently, and wondered if he should ask about the sun and the thick fog and the wailing echoes heard in the night.

Jack’s answer had been a disinterested question as he rummaged through files on his desk. “Should I?”

“Evidently not,” Will had muttered, the memory of Hannibal now all his to keep.

 _Find me,_ the whisper would still come to him in his half-dreams, a gust of warm breath caressing the shell of his ear.

But to find him meant crossing the ocean.

That day Will went to the creek where he used to fish, but he didn’t bring his gear. The dogs followed him all the way to the bank, and then stopped and whined as Will continued to move closer. Abigail warned him, the Hannibal of his dreams warned him of something cryptic too, and he was not about to toss their words to the wind, but he was curious. What was there to fear?

At first glances it seemed like nothing, until he realised the water was just a shade too dark to be right. Beneath its thick murky surface, a crowd of things and shapes moved, far too large for the containments of his small creek. They almost looked like bodies, but they weren’t right either. Misshapen.

A few of his larger dogs snapped their jaws around the edges of Will’s jacked as he leaned a little too close, and they dragged him until he was a good few feet away from the bank.

The dogs knew better and Will did not approach anymore. But Abigail herself was absent and Will could not finish the boat, not with all his worries.

Later that day as a soft thin layer of snow covered the ground, and Will drove to the Chesapeake Bay, to the shores of the great salt pond he was meant to sail across.

He stood on a cliff, watched as waves crashed against the jagged rocky shores beneath. The great Atlantic was so much darker than he’d remembered, almost entirely black. Far off into the distance a thick curtain of mist still obscured the horizon, blending the black of the water with the grey of the fog. Beyond the curtain large and lumbering shadow moved occasionally. Some appeared thin and curving like a kraken’s limb, others seemed monstrous and bulbous, and for a maddening glimpse, bipedal. Dangerous things as large as mountains with echoing voices like dying whale stood between this shore and the other. 

“How,” Will asked when the rotting scent reaching his nose.

“He left an effigy on this shore,” Abigail said, her words a crackle of failing vocal sounds, “that moves still through his will.”

Will looked at her, her failing decomposing mass. She moved weakly on her feet, dragging them, and one of her eyes hanged by a thread down her swollen purple cheek. She had bones for fingers now, brown putrid flesh slowly being cleaned off her by larvae of beetles he wrote books about.

Birds didn’t exist in this world but maggots still did and they ate her as Will wasted time with his petty human fear. For her he would hurry and be gone from these shores, so that Abigail may still have a body to rest with.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go! Weirdness levels between chapter four and three one are about the same, this one is just a bit more aquatic.

The last adjustments to the boat engine were almost done. The trip would be short, as most voyages seemed these days, but it would still be a length of undisclosed time on an unfriendly body of water. Will felt he needed to prepare the small boat as best he could.

When it landed in the bay, Abigail’s hollowing remains were already on it, sitting on the ship’s bow. His dogs were there too, the whole pack with their tails wagging, but they did not board nor did they stop him from approaching the waters. Will was saddened at the thought of their absence, at the safety they granted him on land, but Abigail’s fractured voice came to ease his worries. He would find them again on the other side, wherever that may be. They were a part of him after all.

A cot and drinking water were the only things of sustenance Will needed, and to that measly load he added his rifle and an axe. The cold he could still feel so he dressed warmly, zipped up his wind jacket, gave his dogs a warm good-bye—the kind reserved for children and family—and boarded. The boat creaked and swayed as soon as he stepped on it, and his eyes looked over the rear at the wickedly still waters. Nothing moved the ocean that day, not the breath of air or the engine’s roar. It stilled, quiet and waiting like a predator as they sailed to join the thick of the fog. The shore was quick to disappear from their view.

“Where are we heading,” Will asked the dead girl.

“Somewhere,” her bones jerked in a sharp shrug. “You will know, not me.”

Will forgot the joys of food, for he stopped eating it when he realised he didn’t have to, but sleep was still a familiar human need that came to him. Every night a little shorter, but it came to him.

Their first day on the sea was so still and quiet, Will found sleep claiming him right there on the boat’s deck. He dreamt of that decrepit castle again, surveying it from a distant vantage point. It seemed to grow from the mountainside like a living extension of it, a weed made of stone that shaped itself into something once habitable. Towers and walls shifted, expanding and retracting, rearranging themselves with every blink of the eye, but never into something beautiful and composed. Something befitting Hannibal’s taste, for that was his palace. What kept it so ugly?

“Do you remember when we spoke of it?”

The voice that came behind Will was clear and human, and as he turned he saw Hannibal’s face, a light smile pulled across the lips as he watched his home in the distance.

“I never took it quite so literally,” Will confessed and it drew a chuckle from Hannibal.

“Different times. Different truths.” The pitch of his voice shifted into something melancholic and warm, his clothes blurring from a dark indistinct suit to one of his garbs from Baltimore, stripped to a waistcoat. “My place is vast,” Hannibal said, staring into a fireplace, “even by medieval standards.”

Will recognized the memory immediately, the night before Hannibal left him with a gift.

“Do you remember,” Hannibal approached, “where I told you the entrance was?” The nod Will gave was a little reluctant. “So you know where you’re going.”

“…Yes?”

Will was unsure of his answer for a brief moment before Hannibal touched him, his warm hand tracing his neck until it settled on the back of it. A skeleton suspended in prayer filled his thoughts and from them spilled into their world. Feet clicked against marble instead of glass, and Will found that single reminder of mortality right beneath his feet.

“Yes,” Will repeated his answer with more conviction as Hannibal’s thumb slid across his pulse point, a gentle caress.

“Then you should wake,” Hannibal pressed his forehead to his. Their noses gently touched and their eyes closed. Will felt so safe in that moment, so untroubled that Hannibal’s words couldn’t even chill him. “This journey needs you present. It’s dangerous.”

But this wasn’t really sleep and Will wasn’t really dreaming. The touch felt too real, the presence unmistakable, the breath warm on his skin. A castle behind them echoed and moaned like a living thing.

Before Hannibal could push him back into the watery nightmare, he grabbed his arm, a question clear on his mind and on the tip of his tongue. _Why_ , Will wondered, _why this game._

But instead he asked, “What if I fail? What if I die?”

Hannibal opened his eyes, his real eyes, and they were spacious and vast and they swallowed Will whole in their enormity. He could see the stars in them, their beginnings and their ends, and a voice deep and unfathomable whispered from within him in a language he couldn’t possibly understand, and yet did.

“I will end everything,” it told him.

Will jerked into wakefulness, slumped against the starboard bow, and the first sound that left him was a startled laugh.

How typical. He knew Hannibal as a man; dangerous, assured, willing to gamble, and so easily scorned. Now he knew him something other, something greater, something he couldn’t put into words. And for all its greatness, the human that was and the other that is were no different. Will had to laugh at that, at the petty human scorn of something unmeasurable, at the weight of the world now resting on his shoulders, at the life of a girl snuffed and abused for his punishment.

“Where are we going?” Abigail was sitting next to him, the stench of her unbearable, yet Will perceived it as a sign of comforting. One of her eyes was gone entirely, the other sinking in the hollow of the socket, and he had to assume she was looking at him somehow, her head turned and canted questioningly.

“Palermo. Sicily.”

“Good,” she nodded weakly, her voice hoarse from what little she could use it. “Keep it in mind and we will get there sooner. And stay awake. It’s hard to keep them at bay when you sleep.” 

Will looked around but saw nothing. It was dark now, night, and beyond the LED lamps illuminating their ship there was nothing but blackness and the still waters, something Will felt would be short lived now that they had a destination.

He promised to cut his sleep short and pulled his hand around her very gently, and Abigail’s weary bones slumped against him.  

“Will it be better when you’re gone,” Will asked. “Is something waiting on the other side?”

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I don’t remember. But anything will be better than this.”

“Even nothing?”

“Especially nothing.”

*

None of the equipment worked, the compass spun in unending circles, and no stars or sky were visible above them. They had no navigation other than their gut sense.

Will’s gut sense.

He started listening to it more careful, at the tingles spreading from his core and vibrating beneath his skin; at the ache in his lower abdomen; at the second voice in his head that sounded so like his own but wasn’t. Attunement to some of those feelings helped him navigate, others served as warning.

Abigail’s remains served as a warning too.

Her face was sunken and droopy, painted in a lifeless shade of grey. All the muscles in her face were dead or gone yet still she could convey fear with her posture, and when she did, an ache in Will’s belly was not far and always it came with a bizarre sense of direction.

It pulled him in a circle until he saw it, the bump of water rushing towards them like a wave, but no air was alive to move it.

“Hold on,” Will yelled as it moved towards them with frightening speed.

As it came close it sank further down until it passed right under the boat, but the size of it, the speed, the sea that came alive with its movements still rocked the boat dangerously. It happened a few more time and on one of the last desperate attempts Will almost tumbled overboard. Abigail was there to catch him, to pull him back from the edge, her grip an iron vice that did not belong to a feeble dying thing, or a young girl, or a strong man. She held him tight until the thing beneath the waves gave up.

Will got back to the steering wheel, hands shaking but thoughts clear and focused on their destination as he readjusted the course. “What are these things,” he asked.

“Wildlife,” Abigail said simply, “from a different place. Some are thralls, creations, but all fear the great ones.”

 _The great ones_ , Will tasted the words and it felt at home in his mind. He did not miss the plural nor did he ask about Hannibal either; he knew the answer. But once more he remembered the creatures on land, the ones hiding in human skin, the ones stunted in growth by dark stone cells and human restraints of law that still managed to function around them. Will placed a hand on his stomach, where a deadly wound hid something in him, and he wondered not the first time if that was his fate, if he was just another thrall, if all this need to find Hannibal was not even his own.

“What am I,” he asked without meaning to.

The question scared him and his voice reflected it but no answer came, not even a peep, and he turned to Abigail to see her lips twitch with some will to shed light, yet no sound came out of her. “What were you supposed to be,” he rephrased the question but got much the same—a jittery corpse’s silence.

“Not mine to tell,” she managed, and Will remembered she was there with him through someone else’s will, and their strings of control kept her mouth shut.

*

A storm raged in the distance, a storm right in their path, and Will had to fight the urge not to turn off course.

“You can’t,” Abigail said. “Look.”

The sea came alive that day, the fog retracted some, and for a short while it was all so normal and familiar until the storm reared its head, and the distant shades with it. As far as the eye could see, a wall of grotesquely dark clouds covered the horizon and the sea below it tossed in turmoil. The occasional flash of lightning revealed something large moving above the waves, sometimes a thin tall shadow and other times a mountain in descent.

“We can’t get through that,” Will had to raise his voice as the strong winds met them. “The mast will—”

A cracking sound of splitting wood had Will turning on his heels only to see the tail end of the mast slip overboard and splash among the waves. Abigail stood next to the stump of wood end metal that used to be it.

“Better?”

It was, but only a little.

Abigail crouched by the ship’s wheel, thin and small and huddled in herself, and Will took his place behind it. He was beside himself the closer they got, a terminal restlessness, his heart hammering loudly right in his throat.

“We can’t—” he said as the first wave washed over the deck.

“We won’t—” he said when the clouds rolled over them like a dark curtain and brought the heavy rain.

“There’s no way—” he said when a few yards away from them something splashed across the ocean’s surface, the texture of its skin jagged stone and decaying coral reef.

The dead girl said nothing, her fear unmistakable, her sunken face hidden behind huddled legs. Will’s hands loosened dangerously from the wheel. Another wave, which there were plenty, and he’d be flying off board. He closed his eyes trying to collect himself, trying to find peace inside his skull, a moment away from the impossible task in front of him.

“I can’t,” he whispered and squeezed his eyes so tight he saw stars.

 _You can_ , said a voice, and hands laid over his until he was holding the steering wheel tight once more. _You will_ , and Will opened his eyes but found himself petrified, unable to move as the hands slid tightly around his middle, a warm body pressed flush behind at his back.

A wave hit the boat hard, splashed across the deck and tipped it dangerously, but Will stood still and unaffected, held in place by a balance that wasn’t his. The beast from the sea swam by the ship, revealing an insignificantly small piece of its peculiar flesh.

 _I have_ , the voice spoke again in Will’s ear, warm and tantalizingly sweet, _the utmost fate in you._ And then it was gone, its presence and its grip, and Will felt rain hit his face again.

He must have been a thrall when that little was needed to instill him with fate. That, or the gut-sense echoed beneath his skin and through his bones until he was wildly turning the steering wheel, turning the boat a whole ninety degrees before a massive kraken’s whip split the waves in half as it slammed down on the ocean’s surface.

The engine gave its loudest roar as the boat burst through an incoming wave, waking Abigail from her deathly stupor as she grabbed on to Will’s leg. Her bony fingers were sharper than they should be but Will didn’t mind. His head spun wildly waiting for a sign, his own or the beasts.

“I don’t suppose you can keep this one away, can’t you?”

“Not entirely,” she rasped, “too strong.”

Before she could say more, Will was spinning the wheel again, but something alike a cephalopods limb emerged from beneath the unstable waters, so close to the ship its jagged skin scraped it, rocked it, sent it swinging on the waves. Abigail couldn’t hold him steady and a shriek left her when Will slipped from her meatless hands and slid across the slippery deck. He didn’t fall though, grabbing the railing just in time to steady himself on his knees, but the senses in him were tingling again and he was too far from the wheel.

Will turned towards the water, a high pitched buzzing vibrating in his head. A language if he had to guess, but not one he’d heard before. It steered his eyes down beneath the black waves, so far beneath nothing should be visible, yet many orbs of yellow light clustered together and caught his attention as they spread and contracted rhythmically, like fireflies under water.

 _Eyes_ , Will thought, and a tall limb of its host emerged from the waters reaching high up in the sky, wavering slightly, ready to slam down any moment and split their ship in two.

He heard Abigail say his name, more worry in her voice than he’d ever heard from her, living or dead. But Will didn’t turn to her and scramble for the wheel, he didn’t even watch the limb that threatened to decimated them. His eyes found the creature beneath the waves again, and the buzzing in his head increased.

 _Leave_ , Will thought. The limb swayed dangerously back and forth. _Leave_ , Will thought with more ferocity, his hands white knuckled as they gripped the boat’s railing. “Leave,” Will snarled through gritted teeth as another limb came out to join the other’s menace.

And before their threat could be made true, Will yelled. Loud. Louder than should be possible. He knew the sentiment of his thoughts, knows what he meant, but not what he said or how he said it. The sounds that left him were unexplainable; his but not, familiar and foreign. His throat burned like it caught on fire, as if the vocal cords inside him were not meant to reproduce that sound, those words. Were those words?

Will grabbed his throat, the ache pulsing through him, but he kept his eyes on the strange ones bellow. The limbs retracted one by one in slow increments, but the creature was not gone. It followed for a while, its many golden eyes deep beneath the sea still glued to Will’s before they too dimmed and dove deeper.

The two were left to themselves and the angry storm.


	4. Chapter 4

Will did not sleep for days after the storm. Exhaustion creeped in the back of his skull, but so did massive creatures that moved the ocean’s surface in their wake yet never fully revealed themselves above it. They stalked from distances, waiting for guards to slip or malfunction to strike. They only stopped revealing the jagged tips of their harsh surface when the ocean floor began to shrink and distant lights glittered on the murky horizon. It was a grey morning when they finally saw life in the distance and Will felt like he could close his eyes for just a little.

Smaller things now swarmed beneath the still black waters, pack hunters trailing behind them and trying to cause a stir. One was bold enough to wrap around the propeller and tear it off. It woke Will, and for its effort it got shot while making another grab for the boat’s rear. Milky white blood spread on the ripples of the sea made by the still sailing boat. Little good was the small creature’s sacrifice; the engine had stopped working some time ago, the mast long since gone, and yet the small boat kept on sailing because there was a destination and it need to be reached. The closer they got to shore though, the more agitated their little hunters got until one managed to shove its hard meaty stinger right through the hull, tearing itself in the process and staining the waters white again.

“Don’t worry,” Abigail cautioned Will from wasting energy as he aimed at the scurrying shadows beneath the tainted waters. “Almost there.”

Will couldn’t tear his eyes away from the water filling up the hull of his small ship. I took so little of it, seemingly translucent at first, to cover the floorboards like an oil spill and block out all colour from peering through. He went below deck, crouched on the steps, and reached out to touch it, all caution thrown to the wind when—

A bark jerked him to his feet and Will ran up taking two creaking stairs at a time. The sight brought a smile to his face, all teeth and laughter. Dogs were on the peer, wagging their tails in a symphony of barks as soon as they saw him.

“Almost there,” Abigail said and something like happiness stained her gravelly voice.

The ship was half sunk when it floated to the pier, water slushing dangerously towards the deck, and Will was first to jump off without a glance at Abigail. He expected her to manifest by his side in that strange way she always did on land, but it wasn’t until he had his hands around the third dog that he realized her stench was nowhere close.

Will turned, her name a whisper on his lips, and his face fell when he saw the absolute joy on her dried out remains.

“We’ll find you a place on land,” Will almost begged, his voice urgent as the water sloshed over her skeletal feet. “We’ll bury you proper.”

The dead girl just shook her head and in a voice that sounded like a gasp of relief she said, “My task is done.”

Her thin frame fell backwards, collapsing in on itself, empty now for good and left to be meagre chum for the swarms buzzing beneath. The hunters jumped aboard, all slobbery and formless and pale like deep sea creatures that hadn’t seen the light of day in centuries. They had only two clawed limbs to help them on dry land, and fleshy whips stretching from their bulbous backs. A thousand little eyes stared in all directions, forming and un-forming beneath their translucent skin.  Will looked away, eyes closed and head bowed as they tore the ship asunder and minced her remains.

The few people around them, fishermen and passersby, seemed not to notice a thing.

*

Stuck in a rundown neighbourhood, the Palatine Chapel looked nothing extraordinary on the outside, no different than the next old and dilapidated building. No tourist guides or asked directions led him there, just his usual senses pulling at him through cobbled streets. Not that he didn’t try to ask; there were postcards and brochures depicting the Chapel all around, but not one direction he got led him to the right place, and not one sounded the same.

The Chapel’s sad crumbling outside seemed to be a ruse as much as its shifting location because the inside was warm and golden, painted with ancient frescos of dead saints on arched ceilings. It felt nothing like the cold bleak world outside where blind people shared their oblivious existence with abominations. There was beauty in this place, and a warmth to it Will could scarcely feel anywhere else.

A few coughing grandmothers prayed in the front pews, a couple of seeming tourist snapped photographs in the back, and a very old minister walked between the isles. He looked at Will with his fading eyes and there was a curious twist to his brows, but as his eyes met the obedient dogs pacing behind him, the curiosity unfurled into a quiet horror. He seemed to be used to it, the old man, because he adapted quickly and turned away towards the altar.

Will wanted to reach him, speak to him. He told his dogs to wait and rushed ahead, past the empty rows and almost past the grandmothers, had the sight of their vibrating jaws not stopped him. Razor sharp teeth covered their lipless mouths, and their jaws moved in a jerking motion, opening and closing in quick unnatural successions. Their empty eyes settled on him and Will realised they might have actually been preying.

“They won’t hurt you,” the old minister said just as the women stood up in a rush, pulled on their black veils and skittered out. “They know who you are.”

There was a stutter in his last words, something else that he almost said.

“And who are you?”

“An old sinner,” the man dared to smile. “Spilled the wrong blood and now I pay for it with eternity.”

On closer inspection, the man looked older than any human should, well past the point where his body should have given up. But something kept him kicking while everything in him continued to grow older and older. Will wondered if he too nursed worms in his belly. The minister gestured with his wrinkly hands to the chapel around them, to his prison, but it did not look like one to Will. The doors were wide open and even now people and things stepped through them. But perhaps the man couldn’t.

Will’s dogs came closer and the old man took a step back. He saw something in them that Will couldn’t, or chose not to. Their presence agitated him and he seemed no longer in a mood to indulge curiosities.

“You came looking for his palace,” he said, “and you have found the gates.”

Will looked around again expecting to notice actual gates. The old sinner tsked and pointed with his bony tremulous hand at marble stairs leading down towards the steel gates of the catacombs. Force did not work against their might so Will searched for any nooks or switches over its engraved surface. The steel was oddly warm and it only seemed to grow warmer as his hands caressed it. Then, a heartbeat thrummed from beyond, expanding and contracting the steel like it were a living thing.

Will stepped away, spooked, and bright red blood started pouring from beneath the door, expanding towards them no matter how fast he’d backtrack. It caught up to his foot, barely touched him, and Will slipped ankle deep in it like it was mud. He stopped moving away and so did the blood stop chasing him. One of his dogs, the braves and the smallest, barked once and pounced into the puddle, sinking beneath its surface. Will followed almost immediately and with each step towards the steel door and across the pool of blood, he sank deeper and deeper until it was up to his neck and into his ears and over his nose. But the wet choking feeling surrounding his body was gone the moment his eyes shut and his head slipped beneath the surface.

Under Will’s feet was dust and stone, a narrow and winding crypt before him where the dead held candles to help guide the living. Out of the caverns or further in, Will could not decide, their motives gone from their faces with age and rot. But he pressed on carefully, as did the dogs behind him, and he only had his instincts to trust that he wasn’t spinning in circles because his eyes were more than ready to believe the worst. A glance backwards always held all-consuming darkness, like those pathways didn’t exist anymore, a universe of missed choices forever closed off.

The further and longer they twisted through the narrow corridors, the stronger the light grew as fewer dead were seen holding candles. The tunnels expand until the walls of old stone turned to wood, turned to bark, turned to a forest of trees with leaves and chirping nightingales. The moon shone bright and fireflies followed their steps, casting light on a path that never seemed to be traversed by anything other than wildlife.

The castle was soon before them on a different landscape, no longer growing from a mountainside, no longer breathing, no longer echoing with noise. It was still and quiet, an old forgotten piece of property, completely unremarkable but for what waited inside.

Will used the door knocker but no answer came, so he grabbed the knobs of the front doors and opened them with ease. Stale air and dust rushed out and threw Will in a fit of coughs.

The dogs stayed outside and played, rolling in mounds of autumn leaves. They did not seem to want to enter, and Hannibal would prefer it so, though Will did not see the point in it when the inside was a crumbling wreck. But when he found matches and a candle to light and help him navigate the darkness, he was struck with a pleasant surprise – a feeling almost forgotten by now.

For as far as the tiny lick of flame could stretch its light, the interior seemed beautiful and new. Thick red drapes and freshly painted walls, polished tables and vases filled with flowers. Even the air changed to a warm smell of a recently cooked meal, and in the far distance, echoes of a child’s laughter could be heard. It felt and looked like a home filled with love.

Only in the corners of his eyes did the old ugliness still reside, in dark distances where candle light couldn’t reach.

Will remembered this place well from his dream voyage through it, and he remembered how dangerous the stairs all looked, yet the ones in front of his light were beautiful dark wood and padded with a soft red carpet. Half way up the stairs, a draft agitated his little flame, and in the moments of its weakness Will almost stepped through a gaping hole in the decrepit stairway.

As the candle light stabilised and showed him back the beautiful room, Will laughed sourly at his hubris to even think all danger was behind. The biggest one was right before him.

Was he here to die again? He sinned against a god too. Was this to be his prison?

Before he came to Hannibal’s study, Will found his watch waiting for him where he left it in the dream. The handles were frozen at an odd hour and dust settled around it, the leather band worn and fragile, glass cracked. It seemed like his watch had been waiting for him for hundreds of years. The door ahead leading to Hannibal’s study opened invitingly, and it seemed like he too had been waiting for Will for a very long time.

There were many candles in his study, mounted on walls and on his desk where he sat with a drawing before him and a graphite pencil in hand. He did not hide his work, and Will could notice an homage to the Greek pantheon rendered with two very familiar face.

Will set down the candle, feeling safe enough within all that light, and had a good look at his host.

Hannibal seemed normal, almost happy, dressed in a fine linen shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The look of a man at home and content, hair dangling loosely before his eyes and there was a warm glow in them as he watched Will, his lips curling slightly. “Go ahead,” he said with a slight nod and sat down his pencil.

“Who are you,” were the first words out of Will’s mouth.

“I am exactly who you know me as,” Hannibal responded, “and a little more.”

Will thought on it for a moment, moved closer to the table, and said, “It seems almost foolish to ask if someone left something inside you, too. I doubt it was that simple.”

The toothy grin that spread on Hannibal’s face was an infectiously joyous look that even Will found himself caught in its contagion.

“Once, a very long time ago,” Hannibal answered his non-question. “I killed it and I ate it. I put it inside me.”

Will’s face fell when he recalled his growing detachment of the life that kept him blind once. “Must have been lonely existence,” he said and he knew it was, felt it was.

Hannibal’s face faltered a little from the joy as well. “The dead never want to stay, as I’m certain you’ve realized. And the living didn’t understand. Couldn’t. Poor things,” he said, but Will felt no sympathy from his words.

“Nothing about me was extraordinary,” Will’s brows knitted with questions or anger or both. “I was just another poor thing.”

“I don’t expect you to see in yourself what only I could find.” Hannibal stood up suddenly from his chair, and the quickness of his motions disturbed the light of the candles around him. Between their flickers, something abominable moved around the table before Hannibal’s usual features were back in front of Will’s eyes again. He flinched as Hannibal grabbed him by his arms and said, “Potential.”

Will gulped and the ache in his belly returned with a dull pulse like a second heartbeat. “What do you look like?”

“This is who I am.”

“The other you,” Will said through his teeth as the pain amplified with each beat.

Hannibal shook his head. The dogs outside started howling. The world began spinning. Hannibal helped guide him to a chaise where Will barely had the composure in him to lay down. The pain had now spread to every inch of him, to every nerve and bone.

“What will I look like,” he barely spoke the words.

“Same as you always have,” Hannibal sat beside him and leaned over. Before their lips could touch, he finished his words with, “beautiful.”

Will was a poor participant with the pain coursing through him, only managing to part his lips and allowed himself to be kissed. Hannibal surged, took all Will’s gave and more, and the deep consuming kiss quickly turned into something different. His tongue no longer human, if it ever was, lodged deep in Will’s throat. He made a choking sound as something cool and liquid slid down his throat. Will trash from the pain and the need to get this thing out of him and breathe, but soon enough his limbs relaxed and the pain dulled. Hannibal retraced his tongue, allowing Will a gasp of air between another kiss that wiped his lips clean.

“There,” Hannibal said content as he cradled the back of Will’s head, lulling him to sleep with the gift of a painless birth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do you finish a horror story like this? I guess my answer is that you leave it half dead and bleeding out, and I think that fits the mood. Saying more would ruin it imo, and I didn't have the chops to keep going. I think, overall, it's a good place too end. Some questions answered, some not, and a whole lot left to the imagination XD! I'm sorry, I'm a fan of that, and I hope some of you are to.


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